Here are some lists to entertain and distract you. They are not all
that interesting if you have heard any pop music this year, but they
may be interesting insofar as I have not written much about liking lots
of these things this year. I don't condone these lists, at the moment.
I happen to have them done for two reasons, though. I asked my students
to submit their top ten lists to me at the end of the year, so I thought
I ought to have one done to show them in case they asked, too. Also, I
got an invitation to vote in the Village Voice poll, and it excited me
more than I expected it to. They never sent me a ballot, though, even after
I wrote in and asked why they never sent me a ballot. (They also never
wrote me back in the first place.) This crushes my spirits and makes me
bitter. So, fuck the Village Voice. Now that I have said that, someone from
the Village Voice will write to me explaining such and such and this and that,
and I will be obligated by social conventions beyond my control to show
some slight amount of remorse for saying 'fuck the Village Voice'. But
fuck the Village Voice. Anyway, I don't like these lists any more but
here is what they were, a few weeks ago.

There are two songs I have in mind now. One is "Get By" off of Talib
Kweli's last album, Quality, and the other is I think "Follow the
Light" off the Dungeon Family album. The latter opens with someone saying:
"people don't use our music to get high, they use our music to get by".
Or maybe I'm misermembering it, perhaps selectively. It could be "people
don't just use our music to get high". Either way, getting by is, I think,
seriously underrated.

Also misunderstood, or maybe misrepresented. For example, as being something
one does with 'inspirational' or 'uplifting' records. I realize that talking
about Murray Street, or those two songs more explicitly about getting
by (which I like, but which I don't really listen to looking for anything
along those lines), it might seem like I'm thinking about a certain kind
of record. I'm not.

There are lots of parts in Wittgenstein's later writing about psychology
where he pushes the idea that we may often only talk about, for example,
intentions (like, I intended you no harm, or I meant to say this, or you
didn't understand what I intended, or I intended to finish that on time)
when things go wrong somehow. It's only in retrospect that we attribute
intentions to ourselves, or other people. Often, we go along and do things
just fine, we're understood, we do what we need to, nothing goes wrong.
We could talk about what our intentions were in cases like these, too, but
that might lead to problems. That I'm not going to explain right now.

In the summer, I had a job grading homework and exams for a logic course.
The work required me to travel in to my office every day, yet only do two
to three hours of work. If it weren't for the fact that I was more or less
miserable by the time I started working, late in the summer, I might have
viewed the schedule required of me as a nuisance. But, really, I had nothing
else to do and was unable to do anything else, so having to come in every
day and exert myself just so much actually helped me to slowly become less
miserable. (Other things - people - helped too, but I can't write about
them here because that would mean writing more about being miserable, and
I can't do that right now. But F, E, J, and G meant more to me than they know.)

I don't like the sun. As a rule. But for a while, summer in Minneapolis
was actually hot and dry instead of hot and humid, and for some reason I
actually tried to leave my office one day to grade, to sit out sweating
and holding down papers so they wouldn't blow away. And to look at girls
(of course) and the clouds and the horizon (of course), and to just sit
and be and try to be happy, or at least not miserable. I think it actually
worked. Some.

I have to work up to writing about a record here eventually, but I
also have to break off now because I don't know what I want to say yet,
and I don't want you to think that I have a big story to tell here about
why the record is my favorite record of the year. They just go together,
because that's what happened.